By Mary Alice Bisbee
As a 7th generation Vermonter who left Vermont as a young person in 1954 after graduating high school, so I could get a good start somewhere else, I realize that much has happened since that time, but much still has not happened. Then, I was given a full tuition, 3 year scholarship to Rutgers U. much better than the state scholarship I earned to go to UVM, the tuition was about one half of that at UVM , housing on campus was minimal and I was offered a position as a waitress in the campus dining room that paid for ALL of my meals! Therefore, I had no debt at the end of my four years at New Jersey College for Women/Douglass College.
What has happened to those golden days? And why should we now have to live in a state where agriculture must be preempted by attracting young folks with specific technical/computer skills to move here by offering them $10,000 each to do so? I guess it seems a little backward to me. How about taxing those millionaires and billionaires who now live on our mountain top havens at a fair amount so they can’t hide their $$ elsewhere? Those mountain havens were once where the very poorest of the poor lived. Those poor are now displaced, dead, drug addicted or living under bridges in their home state. Why must this happen?
Why must we continue to pay huge health care premiums to BC/BS and MVP so that golden parachutes can be given to their retiring executives? Is this how Vermonters take care of our own? And what about the hospitals and their ever escalating budgets? Why are sick patients (consumers) held hostage to these huge, dare I say, “corporations”?
Health care is and certainly should be treated as a human right, in this the most affluent country in the world.
Yes, Vermonters deserve much better. Please rethink some of your pro-business, pro-corporate stance on the economy and instead focus on those of us who live here under much different circumstances. You also represent “the people”, I believe, and we are the people as well as those millionaires who you continue to tout as the “bill payers”. Yes, they are and should be paying even more.
Thanks for listening, Phil.
Mary Alice Bisbee
Mary Alice Bisbee, M.S. Human Services